GuestThere is a “going public” that comes before going public. It has nothing to do with stock; nothing to do with strike price or the market’s current appetite for tech offerings. This going public is how companies that understand media introduce themselves to the world.

“There is this whole ecosystem of second and third-tier PR people and consultants who basically fill startups minds with bad info, telling them that they need to be hiring an agency when they really don’t.”

Evernote CEO Phil Libin got a terrible birthday present for his 42nd birthday: a highly critical review of the popular note-taking service by influential tech blogger Jason Kincaid. But Libin’s response was a rarity in the Valley these days: it showed a CEO who gets the importance of good PR.

“The media paints IPOs that are go up as a huge success,” said David Liu, an investment banker with Jeffries who has helped take dozens of tech companies public. “I think that’s wrong, but it’s a fact of life.”

Launch.it, a New York City-based startup that has built a platform for managing and distributing news, has been tapped to power the onslaught of news coming from startups at the Consumer Electronics Show next month.

GuestChances are, if you’re a reasonably successful startup, you’ll eventually face a PR disaster. How you respond can turn that disaster into a marketing opportunity, a bump in the road, or the iceberg that sinks your company.

One product that Apple does exceptionally well is the press conference. This week’s Worldwide Developers Conference was no exception, with a two-hour presentation that, while on the long side, was perfectly orchestrated, beautifully presented, and full of real news.

What happens when a public relations firm sobers up and realizes it actually has limits? When it realizes clients could benefit from content it doesn’t have the bandwidth to provide? This is a serious question that plagued the founders of San Francisco-based PR firm LaunchSquad, and instead of trying to create a new content division, it decided to make a new company instead.

If you’re one of the millions of players who purchased Skyrim in the past week, upon loading up the game for the first time you probably noticed an update was already available. Now Bethesda has announced that another patch is in the works, though the company has yet to detail exactly what issues it will be addressing.